How to play 40K Apocalypse with Epic Scale Figures.

If you have been following my blog, you will have noticed that a few of my friends and I have had a recent renaissance of Epic Scale gaming. Had it not been for the pandemic, we would really have gone all out. However, even with the current reality, this gaming space has held on. This was set up by the Games Workshop release of the Apocalypse rules some years back (unfortunately, they have since gone out of production). They are available from a lot of online retailers at a discount so a viable option for those of you looking for a new way to use your old figures.

The good things about the rules is that they include all the current 40K unit options and with the Forge World cards, many of the old units. As such, you can use your old figures and have the right stats for 90% of the figures. There are the odd figures that do not have cards, but they tend to proxy for other models. The other great thing is that all the unit cards can be printed out for free (well, there is the cost of your printer ink…) or just downloaded to a handheld devise.

The entire catalog is available on the GW website here: https://warhammer40000.com/apocalypse/datasheets/

Get the rules box and download the cards and you will have everything you need, except the miniatures of course! I wish GW would just post the rules, like they did with AoS, but you can’t have everything. We have found the the distances in the rules work very well and probably give a much better feel than with 28mm figures. Out of the box, the 28mm figures end up being packed in like sardines (even more so than 40k). However, at 6mm, things look much more reasonable for battles in the grim dark future. With that said, while you can play the rules straight out of the box with 6mm, there are a couple of things that do not quite work, due to the footprint of the figures.

All move distances and movement ranges work perfectly. They provide for a potentially fluid game, that is always aesthetically pleasing. Were things break down is with aura abilities and area terrain. There are a number of units and command cards that have an effect on either a six inch or three inch diameter. Where the distance is for command/morale, the numbers work fine, as the units spread out more and allow play on the large tables. Where the distances do not work is in the cases of attack and defense modifiers. This is also the case in abilities that cause you to ignore a rule (e.g. units within 3″ pass all morale checks). Now, if your happy with the extended distances, go with the rules straight. However, be prepared for an attack that hits all units within six inches attacked twenty units! So, we have settled on a couple of changes.

1. The first change is that all auras that attack units, modify attacks (e.g. die re-rolls, plusses to hit, etc) are replaced by templates.
2. The second is that all auras that effect the armor save of units are replaced with templates.
3. The third is that all auras that cancel morale roles are replaced with templates.
4. Finally, all area terrain effects are no larger than six inches, so the aura effects to not stretch too far. The standard rules state that if you are occupying area terrain, the aura extends to all units in the terrain. As such, it is obvious why you do not want huge area terrain. The simple thing is just to break large areas into multiple small sections.

That brings us to templates. The most common auras are either twelve or six inches around a unit or point. As the six millimeter figures are about a quarter the size as 28mm figures, the best thing is to reduce the sizes by about the same. It is also much better to have templates to mark such abilities to facilitate checking distances quickly in the game. The simple solution is to dust of the old GW blast templates most of us have hanging about. So, the solution is simply to replace the twelve in auras with a five inch blast template. Further, replace the six inch auras with the three inch template. This seems to solve the problem and is very easy to implement!

So far, that is all that we have come up against with the rules. Should something else present itself, I will be sure to bring it up here. Until then, give it a shot!

• Manteuffel